Waters's ethics case going nowhere

Five months after her ethics trial was postponed and the investigation reopened, the ethics case against Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) remains in limbo.

The delay has been caused by turnover among members and staffing problems at the House Ethics Committee, including the failure so far of Reps. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.) and Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) — the chairman and ranking Democrat of the secretive panel — to hire a new staff director and chief counsel.

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Sources close to the Ethics Committee noted that the glacially slow pace of action by the panel in the 112th Congress hasn’t been marked by the same partisan warfare that broke out in 2005, when then incoming Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) squared off against Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) over the the handling of allegations against former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas). The stalemate lasted into July of that year and proved an embarrassing reminder of just how toxic things can get inside the panel.

But heading into early May, the Ethics Committee is still not fully staffed up and high-profile cases, like that facing Waters, have languished.

“The Ethics Committee is as pathetic as it usually is,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog group. “It’s hard to come up with new ways to talk about the Ethics Committee ... because for so many years, we’ve been talking about what a disaster it is. And the truth is, no one in Congress really cares.”

Bonner said in a recent interview that he and Sanchez were “actively interviewing” job candidates for the sensitive post, which has been vacant since the departure of staff director Blake Chisam last year. Chisam was a former aide to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and played a central role in the censure of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.).

Those candidates include at least one staffer for the Senate Ethics Committee, according to sources familiar with the process.

Bonner declined to say when the new staff director would be in place, and he cannot make that selection without Sanchez’s approval. With a 10-member, evenly divided panel — the only one in the House — Sanchez and the Democrats must approve any hiring decision by Bonner.

Whoever gets the staff director post — one of the most sensitive in the House — faces a difficult task in resolving the Waters’ case.

Last summer. the ethics panel began investigating whether Waters and Mikael Moore, her chief of staff, broke House and government ethics rules when the lawmaker attempted to assist a minority-owned bank, OneUnited, during the 2008 financial crisis.